NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: GREENWICH VILLAGE; The Poe House, And Its Mask Of Red Bricks

It was a pact that Edgar Allan Poe himself might have relished. The little red house at 85 West Third Street, where Poe lived in 1844 and 1845, would be ripped from its foundation, and its facade skinned off and rebuilt inside a coffin of new bricks.

That agreement was struck in 2001 between New York University Law School, which wanted to bulldoze the structure for more space, and preservation groups, which sued the school to save the Poe House from total destruction.

But when the scaffolding that masked the construction site came down early this month, some local residents were horrified by what they saw.

''Walking by, you would never know this was supposed to be the actual remnant of a 19th-century house,'' said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. ''It looks tacked on. It's a facade, literally and figuratively.''

To begin with, the place where Poe started ''The Cask of Amontillado'' was moved halfway down the block, closer to Sullivan Street. Instead of a free-standing, three-story town house open to the sky, it is now hemmed in on all sides by a nine-story academic building. And none of the original salmon-colored bricks were reused on the new facade.

''It looks like a Hollywood set,'' said Arthur Levin, a neighbor and a local preservationist. ''Whether it was bought at Home Depot or some brick warehouse, the brick is clearly new.''

Both parties to the settlement, the law school and preservation groups, said the terms had been honored. The deal, they said, required only a ''good faith effort'' to preserve the look of the original 1835 facade.

''Unfortunately, there was not enough of the original bricks to use on the full facade,'' said Judith Alpert, an associate dean for real estate planning and capital projects for the law school. ''What we did instead was save a portion of them, and put a panel inside the room of the original bricks.''

The brick panel, measuring two feet by eight feet, will be the centerpiece of a study lounge behind the front door. A section of the original staircase will be placed at the rear of the one-story room. In addition, a plaque marking the facade as ''an interpretive recon-struction'' of the Poe House will be installed before the building opens in January.

Ms. Alpert rejected criticisms that the facade looks faked.

''We don't have the grime and dirt of the original bricks, so it looks very new,'' she said. ''Over time, that will improve.'' DENNY LEE